codec for byte transparency

[bowlofred]

Can you give an example? When you say "the string is already encoded", I don't know how that works. I expect a python str() to be a set of unicode code points. To get it out, we need some encoding for those code points. If you're using the str() as something other than unicode, you'll probably need to give details.

Your first post said the s = ''.join(chr(x)for x in b) step was sufficient. If so, I didn't see how a latin1 decoding was any different.